We stand to take our coun­try back

ut­ter­ings, but who, The Base, have per­formed a per­verse call and re­sponse ral­ly­ing cry to keep him in play.

He can count- and his base of sup­port­ers have voted and pledged their votes to him in the fu­ture (2020).

The bet­ter an­gels amongst us has begged for de­cency, but there is no de­cency left, and I am tired of lis­ten­ing to their de­fend­ers.

In fact, this coun­try-filled with de­scen­dants of vol­un­tary im­mi­grants, in­den­tured ser­vants, and for­mer en­slaved peo­ple- has lost most of its ap­peal to for­eign­ers.

Our melt­ing pot is a burnt stew: charred lands scav­enged from the Na­tives; de­ferred dreams tur ned into fes­ter­ing hos­til­ity; black men’s bod­ies ‘lynched’ by a po­lice state; a col­lec­tive, shrunken mind-set that has be­sieged too many white women in the vot­ing booths; and an epi­demic of young, an­gry white men with ac­cess to semi-au­to­matic as­sault weapons!

En­ter the fray: Don­ald J. Trump, a clever man who has been fore­telling this day for decades. The records will show that he didn’t just hap­pen on the scene of this great Amer­i­can im­plo­sion. He did not cre­ate it. But he has been mas­ter­ful: his tim­ing has been near-per­fect and he has strapped on to ride the wave of grow­ing mis­trust of our neigh­bors, vit­ri­olic an­ti­im­mi­grant, racial­ized and racist sen­ti­ments, and the deep void in lead­er­ship on both sides of the aisles in Congress.

I can­not un­der­stand any black per­son who is anti-im­mi­grant. I’ve never bought the ar­gu­ment that ‘they’ are low­er­ing our wages and tak­ing ‘our’ jobs. Who wants some of those jobs, any­way?

But I do un­der­stand why some white peo­ple are anti-im­mi­grant: self-hate. To be­gin with, it took many gen­er­a­tions for cer­tain groups (all who were not al­ready WASPs) to be­come ‘white’ on the cen­sus and in so­ci­ety. They can’t stand the threat of any loss to their stand­ing as white peo­ple in Amer­ica. Read the na­tion’s his­tory. I won­der what Martin Luther King, Jr. would have to say about all this talk about anti-im­mi­gra­tion and racism in his vi­sion of Amer­ica. Here’s one thing he said: “The ul­ti­mate mea­sure of a man is not where he stands in mo­ments of com­fort and con­ve­nience, but where he stands at times of chal­lenge and con­tro­versy. The true neigh­bor will risk his posi­tons, his pres­tige, and even his life for the wel­fare of oth­ers. In danger­ous val­leys and haz­ardous path­ways, he will lift some bruised and beaten brother to a higher and more noble life.”

We need to stand up as real men and women and take this coun­try back. It is ours.